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Welcome to the Application Performance Management Blog, where you can read the perspectives from APM experts. This Blog provides insights into the Application Performance Management solution, as well as technical details about specific IBM products.

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IBM Software - Will It Blend?

Will It Blend? is a viral marketing campaign consisting of a series of infomercials demonstrating the companies line of blenders. In the show, the presenter, attempts to blend various unusual items in order to demonstrate the power of the blender. Items include Golf balls, marbles, cell phones and even cubic zirconia !

In IBM Support, we don't get questions quite as unusual as "can I blend my $500 iPhone?", but we do often get questions about supported platforms for our products. in 99% of cases, I expect IBM Support Engineers go straight to a handy tool called "Software Product Compatibility Reports". This is a comprehensive lookup tool that breaks down IBM Software products like IBM Tivoli Monitoring or Tivoli Common Reporting into reports covering Operating systems & Prerequisites (What Database is needed and at what version? What Java is required?).

Eg, do you want to know what Operating Systems a given product supports ? Tick the radio box for Operating Systems, and click on 'Create a report' under "Select a product" column.

2. Now type the product that your looking for. The search will match any part of a product name, so for example, just type "monitoring", and all products with "monitoring" will appear in the search results.

Select the product of interest the version, and tick or un-tick the boxes for Mandatory and Optional capabilities per your requirements (default is for all the boxes ticked which is no bad thing - the report is nicely formatted without not too much information that its difficult to read).

Hit the submit button and let the magic happen!

3. View your results in a custom report made specific for you, based on your choices. You can even save a PDF copy of the report for future use or print it out.

Each section is broken down neatly so you can clearly see what is, and what is not supported. Additional information is available where applicable by clicking on the small 'i'.

One final point to note. This data is not static - its dynamic! IBM constantly updates the compatibility of its products as testing and verification allows, and so I would encourage you to check back frequently to see what changes have occurred.